TUESDAY, OCTOBER 12TH, 2010 ELEVENTH MEETING OF THE 2010-2011 SENATE

Call to Order Start Time: 7:02pm

Roll Call Finance: All Excused Student Activities: Senators Lederer-Plaskett, Senator Mason, excused COLA: Senator Katz, Senator Cheney, Senator Sadeghi, excused CODEEE: All Present Student Action: Chair Simmons, Senator Doran, excused Public Relations: All Present Academic Affairs: All Present

Approval of the Minutes From 10.5.10 - Approved

Public Forum N/A

Old Business Resolution Encouraging UVM to Progress Towards “STARS” Senator Benes: I got some feedback from some people. I made some pretty good changes. So, I added a couple changes that everyone gave me. Seems like a really strong resolution so I will go ahead and read it. [Reads Resolution]. If anybody has any last minute friendly amendments or questions shoot them my way.

Senator White: Friendly amendment in your last ‘be it resolved’ the it’s is just i-t-s, there’s not an apostrophe.

Senator Vitagliano: Friendly amendment UVM in the title to be changed to the University of Vermont

Chair Adams: In the last be it resolved you quote something. Where is that quote coming from? Being the leading environmental…

Senator Benes: It’s coming from the top, where it’s saying that the University of Vermont master plan states that environmental ethic transformations of the campus and leading environmental university in the nation, right here. And then said again down here. Is that clear enough?

Chair Adams: It’s good, sorry.

Senator Vitagliano: Friendly amendment for adding ‘the’ in front of University of Vermont in the title.

Senator Benes: Thanks

Senator Denton: Where it says ‘by progressing towards the STARS program, are we trying to progress towards it or excel within it

Senator Benes: What I’m trying to say is that we should progress towards STARS not actually implementing right away. Because. I talked to Gioia Thompson the head of the Office of Sustainability and she was saying that she wants to before we do STARS make sure that university improves things that it can improve before joining STARS. It’s a process. What I am just trying to say is to acknowledge to administration that the STARS program does exist and we are looking into it and that we can improve on x, y, and z so we can apply to STARS in the future. That’s why the resolution is progressing towards STARS.

Senator Willis: Is there other schools that may have some program similar to STARS or have STARS?

Senator Benes: Yeah, if you go on the website, right on the bottom, STARS.org, there is a whole list of universities and how they are rated on the STARS program. They’re the ones that have joined the STARS program.

Automatically Called to Question Resolution Encouraging the University of Vermont to Progress Towards STARS – Passes

Bill Recognizing UVM Club Softball.

Chair Adams: [reads bill]. This one has been a long time coming. And Natasha is here so if you guys have any friendly amendments or questions about the bill, if not, otherwise I am going to turn it over to her to do a presentation.

Natasha: Hi, my name is Tasha I’m a junior here. I was actually on the team my freshman year. After it was discontinued we were told that baseball and softball could be club sports, which didn’t happen. After seeing baseball go through the process to get passed last year, this just encouraged me more to do it this year. So I’ve just been working on this quite a bit this summer. Goals are to give the university and student body an interest. It’s one of the only club sports we don’t have. There’s a lot of girls who showed an interest throughout the summer and the end of last year. We’ve had a few intro practices that quite a few people showed up. It’s basically just to help, assist, and give them skills to play, give them something to do, games to play in. It’s going competitive but it will be fun. Anyone is welcome to come, males females. Obviously in the league rules only women are allowed to play in competition. The way we get our fundraising from membership dues, letters to the community, families, friends, and fifty-fifty raffles at regular games whether it be university games, high school games, the Lake Monsters, or donations that we would be receiving from families. They’ve actually already started to come in. What we will be hoping to get to is the National Club Softball Association, which is a recognized league across the entire country. Just like with college teams there are certain sections we’d be in so there’s northeast league, southeast league. I’ve spoken with the women that are in charge of this. A tournament they just had two weekends ago that we were invited to play in, but we weren’t a club so we weren’t allowed to go to it. The League will start for next fall and play numerous teams from Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, anywhere around us. Members are like I said open to anyone at UVM but because of league rules only females can compete. Any level is allowed to come in, any major, ethnicity, anyone can come. We’re very welcoming, we have no set, we just want to be able to play and have fun. Practice facilities, as most of you may know, we no longer have a softball field here at UVM. It’s being torn down and turned into an outdoor track. Right now I’m actually practicing at the North End Complex Field. I have key from Steve to the facilities and I have permission to use the field whenever we like. When it comes times for scrimmages and play games he allows us to their fields and all the utilities that come with it. Hopefully after that we’ll be able to book the indoor basketball court and tennis courts to have practice throughout the winter.

Open the Floor for Questions

Senator Filstein: Friendly Amendment to the fourth whereas to change competition against to competition with.

Chair Adams: cool.

Automatically Called to Question Bill Recognizing UVM Club Softball – passes

Chair Monteforte: Motion to suspend the rules

Speaker Chevrier: So I’m going to quickly talk about what motioning to suspend the rules means because it’s the first time we’ve done it this year. Please pay attention. Suspending the rules is a misnomer. We are not suspending the rules, we are still abiding by the same constitution, we are just suspending the agenda. So right now we are supposed to go on to Emergency Business but we’re not going to do that. We’re going to instead revert back to public forum area so that our guests can speak. So, we’re now going to vote on whether or not we want to suspend the rules because the motion was seconded. If it passes we will then go to public forum so that our guests can speak. And after someone is going to have to motion to reinstate the rules or else I’ll have no idea what agenda piece I should go to next.

Vote to Suspend the Rules - passes

Public forum Kesha Ram, Vermont State Representative Peg Boyle Single, Candidate for Vermont State Representative

Kesha: Sorry that we are late we, we mentioned to Claire, although no need for her to pass it on to all of you, we just had our debate on channel 17 so it took us a little while to get up here. No disrespect and we thank you all for suspending the rules so we can speak tonight. I’m Kesha Ram, the current legislature in the district.

Peg: And I’m Peg Boyle Single and I’m running for the open seat in the district.

Kesha: So I personally wanted to share a little bit about what we did in the legislative session. I don’t think I’ve seen all of since much earlier in the year. So probably many of you are new and I’d love to get to know you all over time. It is really important to me to always come and talk to the student government and share with you what we’ve done in the legislature, but also what I hope to do in the coming years if reelected because election day is November 2 and as many of you know it’s a critical election nationwide and we have a lot of statewide races here in Vermont. As many of you may know I used to be the student body president so this is a familiar room for me. I was the first student body president from the Rubenstein School so I was a natural resource planning major and a political science major and previous to that I had been the student body president from the Rubenstein Schools, so fun fact. Also, the first student of color to fulfill a full term as student body president and the seventh woman. In the 70-80 year history there have only been 7 women to serve as student body president. Just a little bit of interesting facts about student government, it certainly was a big part of my life here. Where’s our Committee on Diversity and Environmental Ethics? Awesome. I created that committee when I was a junior which I felt really captured a lot of the activist sentiment I felt on campus. And that’s a lot of the spirit that I brought to student government. When I first got to UVM, I used to come to the Student Government, not as a senator but as a student and I would come and talk about trade and local products on campus, why I wanted to start a student run café and I tried to get all this legislation I wanted to see just standing on public forum. A lot of the senators said you know, it’s really not a big deal to run and you can serve on the Student Government and you can serve on the Senate. So I did and I served for 3 years on Academic Affairs, great committee. I worked on diversity curriculum issues there, I worked on clean energy development fund, a lot of issues where academia intersects with activism and environment and sustainability on campus. That was a lot of what was important to me while I was here, and particularly student body president. As many of you know, my campaign to be in the legislature started when I was student body president. When I was starting to phase out of the position in March, I announced my candidacy on campus and from there started my campaign. At the time from about that period of time to the election I was teaching preschool downtown at Burlington Children’s Space, so early childhood education has always been something that has been really important to me. And then, of course, I was elected in that November on the same ballot as President Barack Obama and started serving in January. So, currently, I’m the youngest legislator in the country. There have been others younger legislators in Vermont and around the country but right now, sadly, 24 is the youngest in the country. I hope that is impetus for all of you to consider running, here or in your home states. I think it’s a really important and lost perspective in government in general. For those of you that don’t know, only 5% of public servants from city council to congress are under the age of 35 and of that about a quarter are women. So we’re heavily underrepresented in government so we need a stronger voice and that’s for a lot of reasons. Anyone can focus on issues for young people for women, for any marginalized community but it’s a lot easier not to and if you don’t come from that background you might not always think of it. I started the higher education caucus this past year in the legislature to focus on issues specifically related to the cost of higher education and specifically how that affects families who are trying to pay for college. One of the things I’m looking at in the coming years, I’ve been working with work-study office at UVM because what I hear from students, since I’m around young people a lot, is their work-study positions have been cut and that’s not good. When we talk about work force development one of the most important things is to give people paid opportunities to be in a work environment and get the skills and experience that they need. At this point, we’re working on state level funding for work-study so that we can actually implement a program at the state level that helps you all to get back out in the community and take advantage of work-study money and build those community organizations because a lot of them have lost that funding as well and that really hurts our communities, ultimately. Those are some of the specific things related to perhaps young people. I know that for people all over our community environment and education are incredibly important to them. So I introduced one of the first green jobs amendments in the legislature given the state that economy’s in. And most people whether they are young or young at heart are talking about job opportunities. I introduced legislation to make sure that we are closely defining what a green or alternative energy job is, tracking in the state, promoting it, advancing it and making sure it’s a big sector in our department of labor. As well, just working on initiatives to transition our alternative energy economy and move away from Vermont Yankee, which is an aging nuclear facility, and one that I don’t think should be relicensed for 20 years. And make it a priority to retrain the people who might lose their jobs 5 years after the plant is decommissioned for opportunities in the alternative energy economy. A few things that I’ve been working on, I’m the clerk of the general housing and military affairs committee and we deal with a broad range of issues from tribal affairs to labor, from alcohol and drug policies so I’ve worked on lowering the drinking age and decriminalizing marijuana as well. And affordable housing for both renters and homeowners as well as the military affairs part of my role. We are the only committee, there is no Senate committee that mirrors us, so our House committee has this relationship with the Vermont National Guard. We are just trying to stay on top of the latest deployment to Afghanistan, which is the largest for the National Guard since World War II. And make sure that deployed soldiers, their families at home and returning veterans have everything that they need to be taken care of. So just a little bit about what I’m doing and then Peg will introduce herself and then we wanted to take some questions.

Peg: Hi, I’m Peg Boyle Single, thanks for your time. This is the first time I’m running and if Kesha and I both get in it will be the first time in about 30 years that we have two women in both seats in our district. I used to be a research associate professor at UVM so if you got both of us in

with Kesha being the president of SGA, you’d have two people who are really closely connected to UVM who would be fighting for the faculty and students in terms of what is going on the state House. And my husband is a statistics professor at UVM. When I was at UVM the research I focused on was supporting women in engineering in science and going through recruitment and retention activities in terms of mentoring and e-mentoring. We actually grew an e-mentoring program that went international so we paired women in college, masters and PhD programs with women in the industry, not so much in education, to really sort of make that link to industry. So really, that’s important to me. When I was at UVM I was also the director of the Henderson fellowship program. We turned around this program where we offered pre- and post- doc fellowships to bring in more minority faculty here. I’m extremely pleased that through that program we employed Pablo Bose and Randall Harp. They’re just great, I couldn’t be more proud. The other thing I was the director of the faculty mentoring program and one of my roles there was to reinstate a program that had sort of gone stale so that new faculty were not as stressed as they would be otherwise, so they could really do well. And then I moved into research in early education and this is a program that really became very near and dear to my heart. It was called the family infant and toddler project. And we supported families who had infants and toddlers with disabilities. So right off the bat these families were in crisis. So what I did was run the back end as a manager, helped the providers spend less time with the paper work and all the other stuff that was keeping them away from doing what they love which is providing services to help families. So that will be my focus in the legislature, really strong in education. For years here I taught the dissertation-writing workshop. So really, empowering people to do their best is the bottom line for me. And I think I will stop there and we’ll take some questions.

Open the Floor for Questions

Senator Filstein: Thank you both for coming in. I have a couple questions but I guess the first one is for you Kesha. I just wanted to hear about, you mentioned last year that you were doing some work with Kirsten Gillibrand, the senator from New York. I just wanted to hear how that was going.

Kesha: Yeah, yeah, thank you, I’ve done way too much, clearly. The OXFAM International Climate Change Ambassador’s program is what Senator Filstein is referring to. That is something where, OXFAM International is an organization that looks at the intersections of climate change, economic justice, international justice, agriculture. Really just looking at a whole new model for international justice and how we do business across the globe. They brought together women from every state and around the world to come together in a summit in Washington to talk about climate change adaptation. Basically they are focused on the fact that maybe we haven’t quite come to terms with why we have floods and heat waves in the middle of winter and all this crazy stuff in the U.S., but around the world that’s led to complete economic and agricultural devastation. And really just the loss of livelihood for people around the planet and potentially loss of island nations pretty soon. Some of you I know participated in 10/10/10 this week, and one of the organizers for that, Natalie Filion, she is a colleague of mine who actually nominated me for this program to begin with so there’s a lot of connections to that work right here in Vermont. We did, indeed, summit in Washington and meet with our legislators about the climate change adaptation money, which is supposed to be in the climate change bill. As some of you may know, we hear a lot about climate change initiatives, sadly this climate change bill tanked in the senate. Not, thankfully, not due to our Vermont federal delegation but at the same time, we’re seeing a huge lack of political will to move any kind of agenda forward that helps the environment, real healthcare reform, real economic reform, real corporate reform, etc. So, sadly, our initiatives were put on hold a little bit but we still do a lot of advocacy and connect with one another to work on the feds so I’m working with people right here in Burlington to put some of that together. The reason that I got confused was I thought it might be helpful for you all to mention that if anyone is interested in doing presentations for their folks, I was part of a group of women legislators who were sent to the oil spill this summer. So I also had the opportunity to observe the Louisiana oil spill, the BP oil spill, and I brought back a number of pictures and stories and experiences that I would be happy to share with students. I’ve made a number of presentations around Vermont.

Senator Willis: Other than education what other issues would you like to tackle in the Vermont house?

Peg: Thanks Senator Willis. Through my being a research faculty member the other thing I did was I did grants for UVM. I did over $550,000 worth of grants which supported my salary and the salaries of others people. With that, I knew that for every $1,000 I spent on salaries I spent $400 on benefits, most of that was healthcare. If I had to pay 10,000 in salaries I actually had to pay 14,000 and that was a big chunk. So I really understood how the healthcare costs were affecting wage stagnation and our ability to hire more employees. I really learned that firsthand in that experience. I think we need to bend the cost curve on healthcare and we can do this. We can provide healthcare for all while bending the cost curve by getting rid of the middleman where the insurance companies can pull their customers and pull out the profits. By supporting really supporting community health centers where we have where one person looks over your results and coordinates it. What we find from research, and my husband has dome some of this research for the people at the Vermont Cancer Center, is that we can get people from diagnosis to treatment in less time and with less money. The overall issue I see that is going to be really big in the state house is the budget. And as part of budget we need to look at providing affordable universal healthcare. Also, I would like to see greater investments in higher education because it’s a long-term investment. So even if we’re in a crisis time we need to keep on balancing the short term and the long term because if you avoid the long term we just accumulate the crisis.

Senator O’Brien: Thank you guys so much for coming. This question is for Kesha, I was curious if you are at all involved with the greengov.org campaign and if you can explain a little bit more about getting 18 year old college students and even older to register to vote and the importance. And also your stance on getting through the legislature the ability to have 17 year olds being able to register to vote if they will be eligible to vote.

Kesha: We passed that. I am proud of that, I was a big advocate for that, to answer your last question first. That is taken care of and I think that was a great initiative for us to pass, the more voter enfranchisement the better, there’s still plenty we can do. Your first question is about vote green gov, which right now is an extension of the Vermont League of Conservation Voters and we have a very active contingent of environmentally green minded voters in the state and they have launched an initiative called vote green gov to really focus on holding the gubernatorial candidates feet to the fire, and recently they endorsed Peter Shumlin as their green government candidate. So, he is the Democratic candidate and there’s the Republican Brian Dubie. Eventually they will come out with that the focus will be this is our green government candidate, but right now their focus is just on registering voters, all over the state but they have targeted our district and the university as an area to really really try to bring up the numbers. Our district happens to have the lowest voter turnout in the state because half of our voters in the district are between the ages of 18-25. So our campaign last year registered about 1500 people and the district is about 10,000 so that was quite a bit. As proud as I am of that, a lot of those people move or graduate or something happened. Because of the high level of transiency in our community, that needs to be redone every two years really every year, I try to register people all the time. Vote green gov is going to be around. We’re also going to be doing some voter registration through Vermont Democratic Party by the dining halls tomorrow so we’ve gotten a permit from reslife to register folks as they are coming and going form eating because we didn’t want to be intrusive in people’s residence hall communities. Lots of ways to get registered to vote. The College Dems have a table in the Davis Center three days a week. If you call me if you facebook me I will register you to vote. It’s so vastly important for our generation to focus on this election, really all elections, this one is gong to be critical for congress and for governors around the country. In Vermont right now we have a really really clear choice between our gubernatorial candidates. Between one who wants to shut down Vermont Yankee and one who open to keeping it open because he has taken a lot of campaign money from Vermont Yankee. Between one who put in motion the plans for universal healthcare and one who just wants to put together a healthcare cabinet and really wants to drag his feet on healthcare policy. One who wants to maintain social services and one who wants to cut them and that means a lot for families in poverty. The decision couldn’t be more clear and most labor, environmental and social justice groups are endorsing Peter Shumlin.

Chair Morgan: Thanks for coming in. Given the state’s impending budget deficit, is it a priority for either of you to see that the state is level funded this year?

Kesha: Did you say level funded? Absolutely. It would be great to increase the funding but level funding right now is probably the hardest thing for any group in the state to achieve. At least we should be level funding and I would like to find some money for that work-study program, that would be ideal.

Senator Filstein: What could UVM’s role be in getting single payer in Vermont, I know that we are one of the largest employers and we have contract negotiations and benefits are a huge deal. And you spoke as well about if the administration asked the state house, basically what could we do and could we help?

Peg: Yeah, I can answer that. My husband is on the negotiating team for the union, I always on the union when I was here. That’s actually something they are looking at right now, looking at healthcare for employment and making sure that it’s part of the contract they include. It would result in a wage decrease so the union bargaining committee, that’s a really important aspect for them to take into consideration in case it does pass. UVM faculty contracts are 3 years so while the single payer probably wouldn’t be in place by then, they still want that guarantee based on the administration. I will say that the administration has different values and priorities than the negotiating team.

Senator Filstein: You didn’t say if you were, I’m assuming you are a democrat? Or a progressive?

Peg: I’m a democrat

Senator Filstein: And David Zuckerman still here?

Kesha: He’s retiring. We’ll see. If we could just close by sharing our contact information, I think I gave out my last card sometime today. But facebook is a great way to reach me, it’s K-e-s-h-a, there’s not too many of us and I don’t spell it with a dollar sign so you should be able to find me. Facebook is an easy way, email, I have a state email but the easiest email is [email protected]. And KeshaRam.org is a great way to find more information. If you do have more questions or anything comes up please just contact me.

Peg: Likewise you can contact me at pegboylesingle.org or on facebook. And I welcome more of these questions.

***

Motion to Reinstate the Rules – passes

New Business:

Chair Mallea: Bill Allocating Funds to UVM Figure Skating Team

Emergency Business:

None

Executive Reports Speaker Chevrier: I have exactly 14 pieces of candy to pass out. So I did a little experiment this week. Alright, so if you are wondering why you did not get chocolate, I created a little slideshow for you because studies show that if I create a slideshow for you then you are more likely to listen which happens to be what this is about. I did a little bit of research this week because I sent out the following bill so I will read it very quickly. [Reads bill]. So I have been talking a lot about how frustrated I’ve been because it’s very clear that people don’t read the legislation beforehand. You shouldn’t ever have to say friendly amendment to add a comma unless you already read it and only later realized there should be a comma. You should be able to email the author of the bill because that’s why we send it out. If you have any major qualms you shouldn’t say I’m going to stir up a shit storm at senate, you should email the person and explain your frustration so that maybe when you get to senate, it will be a bill that you want to back, and that has not been the case. Clearly, because 14 out of 44 actually got back to me. So, that brings me to my slide show. 14 out of 44 is a 31.8%, so currently senate is failing. And only 4 people from exec responded and that is Vice President Maciewicz, Chair Monteforte, Chair Nelson and Chair Morgan. As far as I’m concerned, none of the other people should collect stipends because a large part about being a chair, or a part of the executive committee, Treasurer Salsgiver not included because her duties are not part of this, a large part of your duty as being part of the executive board is being able to explain to your committee members if they have questions. Or to question people or to think of different ways to make it better. And also, a lot of the time, I know this is an interesting year, chairs have been on senate for a long time so it’s really easy to give historical and institutional knowledge to bill authors, which you clearly can’t do if you are not reading the bill until its up here. You are also clearly not doing your duty as representatives of the University of Vermont if you’re not finding out what people’s thoughts are before you come here because you have no idea what the legislation is. So that brings me to the point of dedication. So Senate is supposed to be your #1 non-academic priority. If this does not describe you it might be time for you to reconsider being a senator. So, responding to emails is an important part of being a senator. I know that a few of you will tell me that you did read it but you didn’t email me, but it told you to email me so you’re still not going what you are supposed to do. It was also sent out to the senate listserv, so if you didn’t get it, there is a problem with that. You are also supposed to be listening during senate, which means you’re not supposed to be going downstairs and getting food because then you’re not here listening. It’s ok to eat when it’s not during public forum, but you should get food beforehand. You also should not be on your phone. I should also not be receiving emails from senators to the senate listserv that we sent during the meeting because that meant you were on your phone as well. You should probably not be talking to your neighbors. I understand that it’s a lot to ask to give away a couple of hours on a Tuesday, but there are a lot of people who really really would love to be a senator. We have really great applications for appointment, and just because they’re not up there doesn’t mean it didn’t look like they were going to pour their heart and soul into senate, it just had to do with the availability on certain committees. So if you don’t want to be here, there are people who would love to take your spot. And if you’re not going to put forth effort, there are people who would love to take your spot. So please listen and please do your due diligence beforehand so when you do speak you’re not wasting people’s time. Also, decorum, being nice to each other and our guests. Public forum is not a time for interrogation. I actually ran into, not one of the varsity athletes who was sitting up here, but one who was in the corner, and he said he actually felt like he was a bad person when he left here. Not that he was a bad athlete or a bad student, but he was questioning everything in his life and he felt personally offended by multiple people on this body. He is a student whose voice we are supposed to be representing because he paid his student activities fee, which allows SGA and clubs to function, and we made him feel like a terrible person. And that’s not something we should be proud of and that’s not something we are going to continue to do either. Senate again, is not a time to go get food, which I already said. And, it’s also a time to learn and ask nice questions, which I think was done today. That’s what I wanted to talk about with that. Please read the legislation beforehand or you are wasting all of our times and that’s really frustrating. I also can’t take full credit for this research study, Steele Taylor who was the previous AA chair did one about ridding the University of Vermont of the number 13. So, I also have a little segue into the attendance policy. Again, another thing that’s indicative of the fact that some people may or may not be as gung-ho about senate as they should be, some people, it’s been reported, have not been showing up to committee meetings and have not been showing up to senate and if they don’t do that sometimes they don’t even give a reason why or they don’t let their chairs know. So, I, Prior to becoming speaker, kind of made the decision in my head that I wasn’t going to have a really harshly enforced attendance policy. I know last year the speaker who started off the year did this, if you have more than two excused absences you have to have a meeting, excused absences. And I was like, I had surgery, what do you want from me? I also think its kind of a pain in the butt, I always operate under the assumption that it’s a lot better to ask people to do something than to tell people to do things, but apparently that hasn’t been working. So the chairs have asked me and I have decided to implement a much more intense attendance policy. If you have more than two unexcused absences then you’ll have to have a meeting with me. This includes your committee meetings. So if one person missed their committee meeting next week and then misses this, then they have a meeting with me. If later it turns out that it was excused, last year, for instance, a kid’s kidney burst during the day so even though it was unexcused at senate because I was unaware of it, it was later turned to excused because that wasn’t his fault. So, your chairs will be reporting that to me. It’s not really going to be that much fun for me, but I am going to do it because I think that it will help this organization. I don’t care how many excused absences you have but if that becomes a problem maybe you should be rethinking that. Also, we started late today because we didn’t have quorum. I understand the Finance committee was in the middle of something important but there were a lot of people who kind of straggled back from the bathroom at 7:05 which isn’t cool. Also, lastly, Constitution Committee, please meet after senate for like 20 seconds.

Vice President Maciewicz: Greetings everyone, I hope everyone’s weeks are going well, I know mine is ridiculously busy, so try to keep a balance from all the studying. First order of business, unfortunately we do have an appointment vacancy open. Senator Linde resigned yesterday, so we will be doing the appointments process which beings today. The application will be on the Lynx and will start being sent out on listservs tomorrow so tell your friends. It is on-campus and the person will be on the finance committee, so factor that into who you are asking, the should have an interest in finance and they should be on-campus. So the appointments committee will be meeting probably sometime next week. If you did that before expect a doodle from me sometime. Spend the rest of this week talking to your friends who would be good senators telling them to submit an appointment application on the lynx. I’ve also, moving along and almost finished with campus appointments. There are a few vacancies that I will be sending out here and there. I have almost all 153 of them filled. I know I annoy you with them a lot but they’re really important and I would hate to have no student voice at the table. If you are at all interested in the ones that I have mentioned a million times, please come see me. Jess and I are working on a map for the office. We finally finished the new tenants and will be announcing that soon. We are going to make a big blown up map of all the desk spaces with their office hours and we’re going to get new signs for each desk saying the desk number, the club who’s on it and has a drop down with the office hours and we can create a directory so that when people walk in they will know where to find Jess or find X club. So it’s going to be really cool. So yeah, we’re just working on finishing up the office, redesigning things and really making it interactive. Please update when you’re doing your office hours because now it will be posted on map and at your desk so it will be really easy to see if you’re not there. Also looking into getting a sign outside for the SGA highlighting our new entrance. We will probably be displaying things about that in the future. President Mensah and I have a meeting on Monday with the administration I know some of you mentioned in passing that you would like to have us bring up certain issues with them. If you want to add something to our agenda with them, send us an email. Its Provost Knodell, Lucier, Gustafson, Gary Derr and President Fogel drops in sometimes so if you have any things you want us to talk about let us know. The Lynx is coming along. If your committee hasn’t had meeting with Jess yet to go over the lynx you really need to do that and if you have I would like to hear from you how you think it went. We’re trying to make the Lynx more functional, get feedback to make it better, it’s still kind of buggy but it’s improved a lot since the beginning of the year. Eventually we will be doing like a lynx advisory board in the next month or so to get more feedback as to how make it better and see if we want to stay with the lynx because our contract does expire at the end of next summer. If you are interested in that please come see me. The last thing I put down is we talked about elections today. The opportunity to register to vote is coming to a close in the next couple of weeks. If you live in Vermont it’s rather late, if you live in some other states its really getting close. So please register to vote if you haven’t or get an absentee ballot. It’s going to be a really important election this fall, I spent a whole summer working on a race so vote and get your absentee ballot or go home and vote.

Open the Floor for Questions

Speaker Chevrier: Are people who are graduating in December eligible to come up for an appointment.

Vice President Maciewicz: Sure, I don’t have a policy about that. It would be nice if they could stay longer but I don’t have a problem with that.

Senator Vitagliano: Is it true that CODEEE lost the office space in the office to club ultimate Frisbee?

Vice President Maciewicz: Undecided. It’s looking like we’re not going to take an extra space but we haven’t made any final decisions. There was 3 more demands that came in that I was not aware of. So, maybe. We haven’t made the final decision yet. If we can get you a space we’ll get you a space. I asked the office staff and the opinion was if a club really needed it we could make do, or if not we could give it CODEEE, or whoever wanted it. I will get back to you by next week.

Senator Lober: I was just wondering what messages you are looking to get across to admin on Monday.

Vice President Maciewicz: It’s a monthly meeting. We talk about whatever we want to talk about with them. It’s our chance to press them for things or get information, so it’s more if you have any things that you want us to say or questions for them. We’d love to have everyone there but it’s a small conference room so if you have anything you want us to ask them. If you haven’t been able to get to them via email or phone we can physically be like, where is this??

President Mensah: Evening senate, I actually forgot to email my report to myself from downstairs, but it’s going to be very quick. Hopefully everyone had another excellent weekend, the weather was pretty good up here I heard. The Honorary Degree Meetings, the meetings that are pretty much take place over in the president’s wing to select the commencement speaker and to select folks that are going to be receiving honorary degrees from the university. For folks that don’t know, Honorary Degrees are usually given to folks whether within the UVM community or the United States or sometimes internationally, that have made some sort of commitment on different levels whether or not its for he environment but they have made some kind of impact that the university recognizes and sees as something that needs to be recognized. We usually invite those people here during commencement to present them with an honorary degree. The folks that are going to be selected if you are wondering, because there were a few emails sent out a couple of weeks ago, those meetings are going on, we had one last week Wednesday or Thursday and we are going to be having another one a few days before the October Board of Trustees meetings as those are things that have to be brought up to the board and approved by the board. Right after that meeting there’s an international advisory subcommittee meeting, pretty much they are just looking at how to engage student experience with international students to see how they are engaging with other students on campus especially through other clubs. I was happy to report that we do find that a lot of the international students do participate in our clubs. For instance there is the Chinese Student club that sometimes collaborates with Asian American Student Union. I was happy too see two weeks ago during the Black Student Union’s signature homecoming event the soul food socials one of servers was one of our international students, the only international student form Zimbabwe this year. I’m happy to see that SGA and senate is having a hand in facilitating those connections. Also, the Board of Trustee report has been submitted, handed in. You all received it so hopefully some of you were able to browse through it. If not, there are still a couple of weeks to. And I may or may not write an oral report because the report I sent in is the one that goes in the binder but is an opportunity to engage them somewhat a little bit more and bring up maybe some more issues. I’m looking to see what that’s going to look like. The other thing that I wanted to mention is that we are continuing our partnership with UVM athletics this year in terms of sponsoring them to give out free apparel at hockey games. Last week I mentioned that it was going to be scarves, and I got the scarf proof, so I figured some of you might be interested to see what some of you might be giving out at the hockey game this November. This is what the scarf looks like. It has the SGA logo is going to be on one side and the athletics logo is going to be on the other side. There is a shipment of about 500 of these has been ordered. As soon as some information comes in about the time, the date for the game has been set and if I’m correct it’s going to be televised game. The date is slipping my mind, it’s the second or third week of November. The senator of the week is actually going to be Tram Tran. I have been seeing her a lot on campus and also at finance desk getting work done. And also, I creeped into their committee meeting and allocations meeting and I just saw her engaging folks and asking question really just trying to make the best decision when it comes to their committee allocating funds.

Open the Floor for Questions

Chair Adams: Point of Information: The Chinese Culture club is not an SGA recognized club nor have they approached me about recognition. There is a Chinese Language and Culture club, they may be merging. But which subcommittee of IAC did you talk to?

President Mensah: It was the IAC subcommittee, that’s was the title of the group, the working group.

Chair Adams: I serve on that and I’m on the student experience committee, I think the list you were given, they sort of asked me for a list of clubs which would be particularly welcoming to international students. It’s not reflective of international student involvement.

Senator Filstein: I know how much you hater rumors and I heard one so I just wanted to bring it straight to you. I heard last year after your submitted your letter to B.O.T. Fogel called you and what I heard it was kind of inappropriate so wanted have you to clear that up, A. And B, to see if that had any influence on stuff in the last week or two weeks ago, with the new B.O.T.

President Mensah: No, so to give a little history as to what Dan is referring to. Last May when I submitted my first report to the Board of Trustees May meeting a lot of things that were included in that report which most of you saw if you read the report, pertained to TRI and how quickly students felt it was moving, increased tuition, increased numbers of students on campus. But not really having taken the time to think about what this means for the culture for UVM. There was a little bit of disappointment expressed from the Waterman. I don’t want to name any one name, but it was mainly I was doing my best to give the student voice and get the student opinion out and how students felt about many different issues. One of the comments was made about the TRI being moved along in a almost a dictatorial type of manner seemed upset one or two people.

Senator Filstein: So, just thanks for clearing that up. I think that’s extremely inappropriate for whoever contacted you to do that. I think it is your responsibility to bring sentiments of the students forward and of senate. I think you did do a good job of that last year and to not get discouraged or intimidated by the administration because I know that a lot of the things we do can be at odds like that. Just acknowledge that for your speech this time, that those things are still real issues. There are a lot of things about TRI. Fogel was there and he was acting kind of inappropriate as well. These things are still alive and to know that we’re behind you and keep doing it and don’t let them bring you down.

President Mensah: I know there was still a lot of questions going about TRI and some folks might have actually emailed Jane Knodell and have gotten no response. But that’s one of those things that hopefully David and I can address this Monday.

Speaker Chevrier: Are you going to be giving us hockey tickets?

President Mensah: That is a great question because that is one of the things that David and I have been trying to work out. Speaker Chevrier’s question stems from in the past usually the athletics department gives SGA a select number of tickets and we get to hand them out during senate the week before hockey games. This year doesn’t look as if they are willing to do that. David and I are hoping to continue the conversation with the folks over athletics and to show them how this might be beneficial or a good gesture to give us a few tickets since we are sponsoring.

Speaker Chevrier: I know that last year Chair Cafarelli who worked within athletics, kind of gambled with that, because he was the chair of Finance he was kind of confused as to why we were using student money raised from the student activity fee to then donate money to the athletics department to sponsor the apparel when the athletics department gets an absurd amount of money from the comprehensive fee that’s much larger than the student activities fee that we were hen donating back to them. The issue with athletics is that we give something like $400 dollars or something around there, for our comprehensive fee that goes to athletics. The mentality behind that is that we can go to games for free. Even if we went to every game it wouldn’t add up to that amount of money, which is the problem and you, can’t get hockey tickets unless you get there really early. So I was wondering if you are at all willing or if you’ve tried to do any of those little gambling maneuvers that Chair Cafarelli was probably inappropriately good at.

President Mensah: I wasn’t thinking about it on that level. Now that it has been brought up I see no reason not to try to do a little compromising and try to do business with athletics. Quick informal poll.

Chair Monteforte: Motion for informal poll.

President Mensah: Informal poll as to who would like a hockey ticket distributed to them Tuesday before the hockey game,

All those in favor of having a poll – passes All those In favor of getting a hockey ticket before the games – passes

President Mensah: Well, I will be looking more into that.

Committee Reports COLA: Chair Morgan: So we have a table on second floor of the Davis Center outside of the Mansfield room and we’ve been registering students to vote. A little mishap because on campus students have to put what room they live in the residence hall so that was a little havoc. We have navigated it pretty well. Senator Fitzgerald pretty much owns that stuff. We got sweet vote t-shirts, a really nice color, yeah, and she got t-shirts, bumper stickers, and pins to give away. I was going to have Senator Katz talk about his PSAs because we’ve made a lot of really good progress on it but I guess he’s sick so that sucks. I’m going to try to go into what he’s doing a little, he contacted Luis Vivanco who I guess is an anthropology teacher here and he is interested and working with the exact same idea that we had come up with. We had come up with this idea where students were like, in their dorms trying to study and a committee member would walk by and be like, really drunk and really loud and he literally said, I have this idea for a PSA and he said the exact same thing. I guess it was just really funny. I don’t really know any more details because that’s his project. Maybe I’ll have him send something over the senate listserv because I think it would be a really cool idea to know where those are going. So Student Neighborhood Initiative Grant is online on the lynx, Please apply. It’s an awesome opportunity for anyone. It won’t be really a conflict of interest if we have senators apply because for me, you are still a student and I think that’s the important thing. Applications close November 19, so we’re still working to advertise that. Friday was community coalition, and I’m really happy because we had a number of students who showed up, so I was really happy about that. When I first started going to community coalition my first year, we had a lot of students that would go and I feel like last year the numbers dipped. And I would really like to see students there. We have a lot of neighbors and a lot of good contacts within the city and it’s really good to have students there to provide a nice fresh perspective and it like, hooks you up with people you won’t normally work with. So, I’ll tell you when the next one is, it’s coming up pretty soon. So Veteran’s Day celebration. Last year COLA put on a big Veteran’s Day celebration in Waterman and we’re undertaking that task again. So, I can go into details about what we have. We are in the process of contacting speakers. We have Veterans who are students who speak of their experience and I’ve approached some Veterans off campus in the neighborhood so they would come and speak of their experiences. We invited some of our federal delegation from Vermont to go. Last year they just ended up sending letters, which is nice, and we read them anyway. We had a really nice video that we made last year, it was a bunch of students saying thank you and we’re going to play that again. I had a meeting with people from Sodexho and hopefully they could donate some food. That would be really cool. We have some people working in Sodexho who would do that. I just think it will be really touching and I’m just hoping to repeat how things went last year. In the next couple of weeks I’m going to be making thank you cards and I would like people to sign them. Those are the gifs we are going to be giving to Veterans on their way out the door because I think that’s important. No City Council last night, for the first time in a month, it sort of frees up my Monday nights.

Open the Floor for Questions

Senator Lederer-Plaskett: Because you tend to attend them, something I have been asked by a lot of students was that in the city council meetings they seem to have ruled out 18 and over club attendance. I was wondering if you had heard anything about it.

Chair Morgan: Yeah, absolutely. The licensing and I don’t remember the committee, but it was brought up last week because Club Lift was there and they were changing their licensing. I can look into it more because I don’t know off the top of my head, but that is definitely an issue because they would have a lot of students come downtown and they were really inebriated. It was really funny because some of the City Councilors asked when Richard Cate was there why these students were acting that way. They want to change how students can enter those premises.

Senator Lederer-Plaskett: Did they speak at all on what is going to be changed or if it’s just a blanket takeover?

Chair Morgan: I can send something to you, it was something that happened in committee and they didn’t talk about it so I can follow up. I will find it, I’ll send it.

Senator O’Brien: I was wondering if you guys were open at all to collaborating at all with the votegreengov.org campaign because I know that they were going around the residence halls this weekend knocking on doors and asking people if they want to register to vote. So if you were open to finding other effective ways to get students to vote, the more power we have the more momentum we give them to vote.

Chair Morgan: We’ll look into it.

Senator Lober: At Community Coalition someone was discussing a program that was piloted at Colorado State University, I believe, to allow students living off campus to register parties. I was curious if your committee is following up on that or if you have any interest in chairing that program with the rest of senate.

Chair Morgan: That is a great point. I think what I’m going to do is I will share with Senate. At this point it would be good if we formulated and opinion on that. I don’t think its for us to have an opinion on that if we want university to implement this program or not implement this program would be a good first step. I don’t want to say its not really our decision to make the program but I know Gail and Alicia are looking more into how to make that program successful from an administerial point of view. I definitely agree, it slipped my mind so I will send something out about that.

CODEEE: Chair Herman: Yesterday was the President’s Commission on Racial Diversity had a meeting. One of the issues that is being addressed and is a concern is the university’s stance on Arizona Immigration law. I thought that was interesting because it was something that we focused on at the end of last year. They actually asked President Fogel about endorsing some political elements in regards to Arizona Immigration law. Pretty much they wanted to know if they could boycott UVM would be able to boycott Arizona based products. President Fogel indicated that it was something that they would look into but as a public university you can’t make political stances but the Arizona Immigration law could possibly be an exception. So not a straightforward answer so they’ll be looking into it. They also are making recommendation the committee on moral social and ethical considerations in investment, which is led by Al Turgeon. They actually looked to student government’s legislation that was passed on this topic and they referred to our resolution opposing the Arizona Immigration law to the ethics committee so that’s something that’s good, they loved the resolution. Aside from that, another issue that came up that CODEEE will look more into is the graduation rates of ALANA students. Most times, the publications that people see are the first year retention rates, which are really high. What you don’t see is the rates after the third year and the graduation rates which often times decrease drastically after their first year. Hopefully we’ll be working with Academic Affairs and be contacting the various colleges on campus and just asking them how they offer services in their colleges to actually assist these underrepresented students on campus. So that is something that we will be looking into. Oh, the Campus Climate survey. Not everyone was here when Abigail McGowan and Diana came in at the end of last year. Abigail and Diana were on the affirmative action and equal opportunity department. They started a survey on the status of women and it grew out to the entire campus. And the campus climate survey, which was actually supposed to be put out within the next few weeks, has been put on hold by the chief diversity officer. It was put on hold because the chief diversity officer, which is Wanda Heading-Grant, she felt that the survey had no focus. She is putting together a committee and she wants feedback from different people about what to put in the survey. The survey will definitely out by next semester because there hasn’t been a campus climate survey done since 2005 and there needs to be one systematically at least 2-3 times a year and it’s been 5 years already.

Senator Benes: Hey everybody. So yesterday I sent out the clean energy fund email just kind of having a call of ideas that we’re sending out. If anyone has any ideas of renewable energy projects that can occur throughout the University of Vermont post those on there. You can also go on there and vote for your favorite and put a thumbs down for your not so favorite ideas. It’s kind of tricky when you get onto the website you have to click on the link and then you have to register with the website, but its just your email and UVM password, and then it lets you into the website and you can do that. It’s just a little tricky thing, you don’t get weird emails, you just get access to voting as a UVM student.

Chair Mallea: Point of Information: What Greg was talking about with Campus Climate Survey, it will be coming out next semester.

Open the Floor for Questions

Senator Lederer-Plaskett: Point of Information: For the Arizona bill, I did the research into it in terms of the boycott, our predominant source is actually the Fender instruments that we get in the music department are the biggest most expensive item that comes out of Arizona and then there’s just simple technology. Financially it wouldn’t be a burden it would just be the legality of political action.

Speaker Chevrier: So I really want to thank you for your initiative for looking into graduation rates. From senate historical knowledge, at the beginning of last year President Fogel came and spoke with us and a lot of people were asking him and hounding him about the fact that there are so many forced triples and there are too many students and his response was yes, but we have the highest number of ALANA students and he never touched on the fact that we have the highest dropout rates of ALANA students. It’s really important to get accurate information out because the way that the University if doing it is not ok and they are kind of using it kind of as a scapegoat for shoving people into res hall rooms and I don’t think that’s appropriate, so cheers. Also, it turns out, a bad Point of Information, Arizona iced tea apparently lost thousands of dollars in the wake of Arizona passing that bill and they are based out of Maine.

Senator Sadeghi: In regards to the public university can’t take a political stance, I was wondering if you can you elaborate and to what level if you know.

Chair Herman: That was just Fogel’s quote, that’s exactly what he said word for word. In a meeting he said that Public universities cannot generally make political statements but this could probably be one of those things where they could take a position.

Vice President Maciewicz: The university is banned form endorsing political candidates by the IRS code but it is not in fact banned form taking political stances, its actually quite well documented in public universities. This admin does not like to do so.

Senator Lederer-Plaskett: To continue what David was saying, a political idea we are allowed to take a stance on. But this is very touchy because Jan Brewer is up for election, I can’t remember if it is this November or in two years but it would be construed potentially as endorsing one candidate over the other, but ultimately, pardon my language but kind of a lot of bull. He doesn’t want to put his name on something when he personally hasn’t really stated how he feels about it.

Senator Corkins: Is this a good time, you were talking about expanding the clean energy fund to green landscaping and other green things. Would this be a good times for people to send in ideas pushing for those types of things?

Senator Benes: Probably not the best time to start doing that just because we’re still in this trap right now in how the clean energy fund is working which is for renewable energy projects. I’m going to start opening that dialogue over this coming year to possibly doing that for next year. Keep up renewable energy projects for now and keep the other landscaping projects and other awesome things on the back burner for the time being.

Student Action: Senator White: Chair Simmons will be emailing out his report.

Public Relations: Chair Monteforte: Hey senate. You are all looking good today. It’s chilly in that PR corner but the PR heart warms me up. So PR, we are now on twitter, yaaay. So basically we have 91 followers for some random reason, which is kind of cool I guess. It’s interesting thought because a lot of organizations on campus such as Bored follow us and so people are looking at what we do so we are looking into that. Right now it’s linked to facebook, thanks to Semir, so every time we type something on Twitter it automatically goes to Facebook. We’re looking into how to do that for the Lynx as well. So tell your friends, I don’t know who really uses Twitter but if you want to it’s there, we’re trying to use it. SGA Live at Brennan’s show is still Wednesdays at noon. We are looking to possibly change the time to a more dinner time hour. I don’t know if you’ve gone or seen it but it’s kind of been a question and answer period where someone moderates and then we answer the question but we are thinking of turning it into a talk show where we sit on a couch and talk about what we want to talk about and then do questions. So we’re looking to kind of revamp the show. I talked to UVMTV today and we’re kind of looking to make an SGA channel because they do have 4 channels so we might be able to have a whole channel devoted to SGA perhaps. That’s good for us. Other things going on, I do meet with The Cynic and other media groups every week. If you ever have anything you want to talk about with them I can relay information from you to them, and I also give them notes about the meetings that go on and they email me if they have questions about it. I often just email out whoever is in charge of that just to let you know what goes on there. VSOP is coming out soon. We are just waiting on getting a few other things sorted out. Ideally that’s going to be a random sample of UVM students instead of just everyone. Unfortunately not everyone will be able to answer the survey but it’s going to a random sample so we can get a grasp of what’s going on. Also, Whitney O’Brien wants to let you know that she is back and ready for SGA action. We are really going to be ramping it up and start tabling and be like Yo, we have a Finance seat open, who wants to join? Yo, do you want Coke, do you want Pepsi? It’s going to be a fantastic time. Also, I put out a sign up for SGA Live at Brennan’s today. Giselle and Todd are the only people who signed up so thank you. I encourage you all to sign up because it’s a good way to get out there and talk about issues that are going on and for people to see your faces. The winner is for our apparel is the lovely L.L. Bean fleeces. I’m sorry if you don’t like them but that’s what the vote said and that’s what it’s going to be. We were talking about maybe moving from the old SGA logo and making a new one for the fleece but it turns out that we can’t do that because it’s a University trademark. We were going to see if you wanted to implement that but then we decided we would like to keep the logo that’s on the scarf. So I think we’re going to go with that. If anyone has any objections to that Email me. Also, my senate representation. Since I like making people laugh I have had a project of matching senators to Disney characters. This first one right here is Senator O’Brien and Tran. This is in now way to offend anyone but to have a good time. I also thought this maybe described Kofi in some way so you can decide who is who. [plays movie]. So Ed, the laughing one was Whitney and the shut up on was Tram.

Open the Floor for Questions

Senator Filstein: Why is the new VSOP being a random sampling, is that new? And if so why?

Chair Monteforte: So in the past VSOP hasn’t really been statistically significant. It’s kind of been going up to random people and saying, hey, fill this out. If you have a strong issue on something you can make all your friends fill it out. So it doesn’t really capture the entire UVM experience or people that walk in the Davis Center, people that are in the Marché. So we talked to Pat Brown, the Student Voice that we use here, Stat teachers and the Office of Student Research. So we kind of got them to say how they do research. So basically we are going to give them our survey and they are sending it out to a random sampling of UVM students that covers everyone fro on-campus to off-campus, different schools and everything. Hopefully by doing that we get a good amount of people that respond to it and good sampling that represents the entire UVM community. You probably don’t like that idea.

Chair Nelson: Just to keep going on this statistical thing, I totally follow you there with knowledge of statistics. I’m wondering, so less people would be taking it, so are we going to have a way to assure that they are taking it? Is it being emailed out?

Chair Monteforte: We can see the response rate and who is responding by sending it out by email. If we don’t get, we will have a quota for what we want to reach, number wise, and we will just kind of keep sending it out to random people until we get the number that we want.

President Mensah: Point of Information: The system Nick is referring to is also used the university wide level a lot. As I mentioned last week the survey that is going to be coming out for the student success survey that they are also planning on using the random sampling for that as well.

Senator Tran: Have you come up with questions yet?

Chair Monteforte: Ah, yes, I can actually email those out. We came up with a few questions based on issues of Coca Cola based on what would your reaction be if Coke was off campus? Do you really like Coke products? How do you feel about water bottles? Things like that. We are actually in the process of sending to Student Voice, which is survey company, and they are going to tell us this questions sucks and maybe you should rephrase it like this. They will help us make the questions unbiased. After that, about maybe a week or two after we’ll have another survey going out to more random people about another topic. Hopefully by the end of the month we will have all of our questions.

Senator Filstein: Are we paying this corporation?

Chair Monteforte: We already paid for Student Voice. Orientation uses them for surveys. It’s a program that we’ve already paid for, Student Life pays for it so it’s not like its extra.

Chair Adams: Point of Information: It’s the same company that does the lynx, so we pay them for both.

Academic Affairs: Chair Nelson: Ok, I can be short. We kind of continued trying to work out some of the kings on our program, academic program, our liaison program. I think we are finding more and more reasons to have it and to be using it, such as the thing Senator Herman was talking about for retention with ALANA students. Senator Lober and Senator Filstein met with College of Arts and Sciences this week with Dean Miller and kind of worked out some things on how we would represent all the things in Arts and Sciences with the liaison program because there’s so many different departments. She was all for the idea and so we’re still trying to consider how formal we want it to be and still just working out the framework for it. I’ll mention right now, because it’s pertinent, that the College of Arts and Sciences is requiring that syllabi be posted and I’m going to yield the floor to Dan or Asher to say a little bit about that. Is it going to be online?

Senator Lober: Yeah, right now as the department stands, Dean Miller is requiring that professors post their syllabi anywhere online. It probably wouldn’t help students out too much but it would be a pretty easy process for the College of Arts and Sciences to compile a list and students could access syllabi that way.

Chair Nelson: Thank you, so on that note, through this liaison program thing, we’re trying to get a better idea of where Deans and faculty stand on the issue of syllabi and evaluations so that we can deliver an effective message to Jane Knodell and the higher administration so that these things can be implemented in near future. In other news, meeting with ERTC this week, which is educational research technology committee as well as the curricular affairs committee and I’m going to yield the floor to Asher, again to talk about faculty senate.

Asher: Yeah, yesterday Senator Filstein and I attended the second faculty senate meeting which was from 4:00-5:30 in Memorial Lounge in Waterman Building. It is a pretty complicated session. They went through a few different things kinda boiled down to TRIs and that was a hectic fifteen, twenty minutes. I don’t really want to get into it, but it seems like a lot of the faculty were really struggling with their interactions with the administration so I just encourage people to attend every month. It would be really good to see people there giving faculty our support.

Open the Floor for Questions

Senator O’Brien: I was wondering if you guys were planning to look into advisor evaluations because I know that I can speak for myself and I think I saw that there is trouble with either communication with academic advisors or advisors not necessarily having the knowledge to point students in the right direction or not having the resources to answer questions or having them say just go do a cats audit.

Senator Tran: Point of Information: I hope this is appropriate, you can just change your advisor.

Senator Filstein: It’s not been on our immediate agenda but there has been some talk in the past about having a new advisor center and just kind of reworking the whole advising system. So it is something that has kind of been in the discourse and it is something we can look into. But again, if you have a teacher you really like you can switch to them.

Senator Lober: I think I might just raise another question but I think that at the end of maybe last spring someone was talking about having an online database with your record with certain advisors so it would be catalogued and use it as proof.

Finance: Chair Mallea: Hi guys, sorry we were late this evening, we had another late meeting, two weeks in a row, I promise we’ll try not to do it again, however clubs keep coming in and we have them scheduled for 10 minute intervals from 5:15 to 7:00. There is a high demand for requests for supplemental funding. With that said, this is kind of a good segue, the Finance Committee had a conversation tonight and I’ve been speaking with Pat Brown and Treasurer Salsgiver as well as Blanka about possible increase in student activities fee. We will be looking into that and I will be keeping you updated on that. It’s just in the very beginning stages so if you have any questions let me but I just wanted to let everyone know that this process is starting. Also, as far as allocations this week, we had a lot of allocations this week. We will be bringing up a bill allocating funding for women’s figure skating next week for a uniforms request.

Student Activities: Chair Adams: Hi friends, thanks for recognizing softball. Natasha has been working very very hard all summer and you can see she had her plan all done, so they’re on their way. We are underway with the liaison program. We’re short Senator Linde now so he will be replaced as Senator Golfarini’s counterpart shortly. Shout out to Senator Malloy who has already seen 4 clubs, 5 clubs, that’s a lot of clubs to be talking to already. The other thing our committee is looking in to is constitution, changing our constitutional by-laws about our organization’s constitutions. So looking at club constitutions. With the Supreme Court case over the summer that all clubs have to be inclusive, a lot of schools are adopting just a blanket a membership statement and making every club put it into their constitution. Intuitively, it kind of makes sense so that’s something we’re looking into. We’re also looking into mandating clubs revisit their constitutions every 4 years because, again, it should be reflective as to what is happening and not say your club consists of four people as say SA Concerts currently does. Their constitution was last updated in 1978. Just saying, most clubs don’t know they have constitutions so bringing that sort of back into the limelight. Registration on the lynx for new club is back up. I think we’ve been able to sort of backtrack with BUG and the Multiracial Student Group. I think the only club not on there right now is Softball, which is excellent. Liaison program is underway. Hopefully the next club to come up will be badminton. Also, last Tuesday a bunch of us were there, but student life had a conversation sit down with some leaders on-campus invested in social justice type issues. President Mensah and Vice President Maciewicz and Chair Mallea as her role as Pan-Hel president. A lot of people felt that was a really good experience gathering different leaders on campus. Student Activities may sort of look into hosting those types of conversations in the future just so clubs sort of get to know each other and how to collaborate better. We are developing our criteria points system, similar to how Leon does club sports. We are working closer with Finance on that as we get going.

Senatorial Forum Chair Monteforte: I forgot to mention in my report. I had a meeting with Blanka to talk about pricing for our fleeces. We are still aiming at about $10 from each person. If you have a financial situation or something like that I would suggest talking to Blanka or David or Kofi, I mean, I don’t need to know that so talk to Blanka or something. But, once I have an exact price I will be sending out the size chart again so you can make sure if you do really want one you can put your name down and if you don’t you can take it away.

Senator White: Fun update concerning the Coke contract. What I have here is 5 out of 30 written on our nice little notes pads, courtesy of our Eco Reps, responses that we gathered from students last Friday in the Davis Center thanks to Semir, Alyssa, and Simmons who is not available. Like I said, we got 30 written responses, which was just wonderful, a wonderfully great turnout. So with the exception of two of them, people raised the environmental concern which is coke has a lot of plastic bottles. So, for those of you who say we don’t do student opinion, there’s your student opinion.

Senator Mason: Hello, I ran into a Coke representative while I was working in the Davis Center or while I was walking in the Davis Center, I can’t remember if I had the green shirt on or not. I wanted to see if people agree because he talked to me that we could contact them at any time, they could come in here to speak to us at any time and we could ask questions as well. He posed some great ideas to me and another senator and was talking about and asking him about c getting the Coke thing that they have now where you can give them your coke bottles and they will reuse them and different alternatives they are working on to become more green, so to speak. I can kind of get that information from them and see if we can get them in here because I think it be a good point of view to get. So let’s try to increase numbers on opinions we get.

President Mensah: 2 quick things. I just first actually want to personally applaud every single one in here. Over the past hour we have had 11 senate meetings for the 2010-2011 school year and this is one of the meetings that all of you have been, in my opinion, the most attentive. I have seen a lot of people really listening to each other and really engaged especially with the speakers in public forum. I’ve seen less heads looking down at whatever that is that folks are looking down. I’m really seeing that you all are really being attentive at senate meetings. That helps the meetings go faster and ideas spread more. So I just want to applaud and thank you all for doing that. The second thing is that I would love feedback about my weekly emails that go out every single week. I have been receiving, actually, ever since I started the whole different language thing, I’ve gotten positive feedback, even to the point where students are suggesting their own home languages to be put in. This past week’s, Barev, which is Armenian for hello. That was suggested to me by an Armenian student. As soon as I send an email I get three, four responses back from different students from different cultures that would like a hello, it just gives them a homey feeling. It’s another email that students are getting with tons of other email that they are getting. Some are like could you look into there are just so many different things with the email and you are senators and I know that some of you read the emails and some of you may not, so any feedback that you may have or have heard around campus on how to make my emails more better, how to make them, I don’t know get a certain message across. I like to start off with a little something about what senate has done or what is going on on-campus that needs more attention or whatever and then going into listing other events or whatever people send me. This was the eleventh email that was sent out yesterday and there’s always room for improvement and I’m someone who always like to get back constructive criticism because it only makes the output of whatever it is that you are doing that much better. Email me or come by office hours so that emails in the future can be that much better, I would really appreciate it.

Chair Adams: I just wanted to touch on the hockey tickets situation. We all voted that we kind of, wanted hockey tickets, I know I didn’t. It kind of, we can all get hockey tickets downstairs.

President Mensah: Point of Information: You are perfectly right in the years past students have been able to get hockey tickets at the info desk, but this year they are really bringing everything back to the box office so the only way that you can get tickets is to go to the Gutterson Patrick gym and get a ticket.

Chair Adams: We can all get tickets the same way any other student can get tickets. It just kind of seem silly that being a senator makes us entitled to hockey tickets and I don’t really know why that connection has been made or if its something we really want to spend our time discussing.

Senator Sadeghi: I think it’s a good point, but I feel like this year we are going through this communist view, you know, everything from priority registration, having everything equal.

Speaker Chevrier: I wanted to talk again really quickly, about how I mentioned briefly during my report that I would suggest that the people who receive stipends and who apparently don’t read what’s send out really consider not accepting their stipend for this week. This is your job, you are getting paid because you are doing something for the student government and because you are a student representative and a student leader. If anybody asks you what STARS was, you probably wouldn’t have had a good answer because you didn’t read the legislation. And I’m willing to guess that last week you didn’t read the legislation beforehand either. So I understand that there is no real way to force senators too but I think I would suggest not collecting a stipend and that includes the executive members as in these three and the chairs. Oh, and the Constitution Committee please stay after for 30 seconds.

Chair Herman: I would like to say that, I know that you requested for everyone to reply but I’m extremely busy so for me to reply to something like that, I just didn’t feel the need to reply. It wasn’t really important, in my eyes so I didn’t reply.

Senator Mason: Just to go off of that, I know it’s important for us to reply to the emails about bills and resolutions and stuff. I don’t know how most people’s phones work but my phone everything comes to my cell phone. I read over everything, I don’t actually look at the punctuation. I don’t feel as though it’s a huge deal if people make friendly amendments for bills that come up. And I don’t know if my chair actually replied to the email but I know that we talked about the bill in our meeting and I know that we’ve been doing a lot of work with our liaison program. I can’t speak for other committee members’ chairs but if they have been working as hard as I believe mine worked, I don’t believe we should not give them their stipend because that’s just one component of it. If you may not have replied to an email but you read the actual bill and you talked to your committee about it, I don’t think that’s a need for them not to get their weekly stipends. I just don’t agree that’s not fair because that’s not the only job they are given. I know that my chair and our committee worked really hard and I wouldn’t agree with that.

Senator Lovell: Just an interesting thought, I work downtown at Ken’s Pizza, if anyone doesn’t know. If I went in every day and did ¾ of my job, I wouldn’t have it. Random thought.

Senator O’Brien: So PR worked on a really cool Coca Cola thing called the vital sign that’s going to be hung up next week. We couldn’t hang it up this week because Greek Life was doing some sort of poster contest. If anyone in the future wants to makes signs with us it’s really fun, last year we made a really huge tuition poster sign, not just PR, other people. It’s a really great way to get the dialogue flowing and that’s the really important thing because all of us as senators we’re here to talk to students and during our elections when we came up with platforms and we talked about wanting to change the way we talk to students these are perfect opportunities. So, coming up next week we’ll be working on new ideas to do outreach to students and getting the dialogue out there about the coca cola contract and having tabling bonanzas with coca cola information, water bottle information and also the appointment process. And also, as miniscule as it is to other people it’s important for to us to reach within our own personal networks, but that might also just perpetuate the view that SGA only wants students that we are connected with. I think taking these small things and maximizing the opportunity to get out there and talking to students is what really counts and in the end we’ll be really accomplished. If anyone is interested in tabling that would be super. Keep and eye out downstairs we’ll be putting up some more information with coke and the appointment process.

Chair Adams: I’m glad you’re back Whitney. Also, along those lines when we’re looking at people who we think would be good senators, I would love to see it go out to an college currently underrepresented. I know its not currently a requirement but If you know people in like, nursling and health sciences who might also make great senators then just encouraging them to apply.

Senatorial Comments/Announcements Senator Lederer-Plaskett: So I’ve been making this announcement for many many weeks in a row and I apologize. But, basically our program is now underway and I encourage you all to attend the workshops that will be occurring next semester as well as our committee meetings, the next one will be Monday the 18th in the Gormley room. It’s the Dismantling Rape Culture Project, which its not really allowed to be called, but I’m going to call it that anyway. If you have any desire to get involved its a major issue on our campus especially where we discussed last week the absence of blue lights through a lot of campus. There really are things that apply to all of you, be you male or female or anything in between, it really is a critical issue so please come attend.

Senator O’Brien: A few international clubs that I’ve been talking to some students and they’re hoping to form them. They are not recognized and I don’t think they have approached Chair Adams but perhaps in the future they will be. The Vermont Student Council on World Affairs and basically they have plans working with foreign delegates who are coming from around the world to the country to work with companies in Burlington to gain knowledge on job of their choice and go back to their home country and get that started whether it be green jobs or government jobs, etc. And also, as part of work with global studies some students emailed me in regards wanting to start a Vermont United Nations chapter which is really exciting. I was on the United Nations in high school and that was really fun. And also, lastly, if you are interested in supporting a really awesome student initiative one of the Honors College student, Timar Beck, is starting up a dialogue on Israeli Palestine conflict, which is really interesting. So if you are interested on going to support that initiative or also just joining the dialogue it’s going to be tomorrow night at 8 pm in the University Heights North seminar room. So if you have any questions about that let me know.

Senator White: the four senators you would most like to see naked, myself, senator Simmons, Giselle and Cletus will be featured in the Prudent Students Calendar which comes out in a month so buy it from us.

Senator DeVivo: You all got my email, I think. I still needed one judge for the event for Greek Week, Greek Synch, it’s basically a lip-synching slash dancing slash hilarious competition. If anyone wants to do that it’s at 7pm in Ira Allen tomorrow. You have to be there at 6:45 it will probably go to 8, maybe 8:30, to be safe we’ll say 9. If you are willing to do that it would really help me out, it’s absolutely hilarious, so please join us. And talk to me after.

Chair Mallea: Something that directly pertains to SGA, I wasn’t going to say this in my report because it doesn’t pertain to finance. I’m chair of the Board of Trustees selection committee and we need a SGA representative because the SGA representative that we have currently cannot fulfill that duty anymore. This duty entails selecting the new student trustee for the Board of Trustees for the University so it’s kind of a big deal. We need one SGA representative. If you are interested please let me know.

Senator Filstein: Just to clarify it has to be and off-campus senator and I’m the other, there are two SGA reps and I’m the other, we lost one, so if you want to spend more time with me, it’s a good way to do that.

Senator Cesario: A couple of things. Number one, 350 day was the day before yesterday anyway it was the global work party, we’ve been talking about for a while. Paige who helped in organizing it got some CODEEE help and it went really well. There were a lot of things all over the city. I spent most of the day harvesting carrots at the Intervale. Which, if anyone feels like getting their hands dirty, they still need a lot of help harvesting veggies. Anywho, so that was really successful. Also I was reading The Cynic earlier today and there was literally like 5 articles on things we’re working on, Provost search, Gened, Priority Registration, Coke. Read them, they are really interesting. Kofi gets some nice advice on his weekly emails. It just kind of reminded me that its super important to talk to our friends about what we’re doing and just talk to people about it because it’s often not something we think of as our jobs as senators. Just talk, I sparked a conversations about coke with my friends and then they start telling other people so just talk to anyone that you ever talk to if you hear the word coke, just bring it up. I also wanted to inquire about the fleeces. I was kind of curious where are we getting some of the money from because I’m assuming that the 10 dollars a person doesn’t actually cover it and I was thinking that there is a better way for us to be spending our money than on fleeces for us? No offense, I know we like our fashion. I’m sure a lot of clubs would like that money

Senator Lederer-Plaskett: I’m fostering 3 kittens in my apartment right now so if anybody wants to adopt a kitten let me know, I really don’t want them in my house anymore.

Chair Adams: I’m going to watch Glee downstairs on TV that no one uses. Oh, is it on at 8? Ughhhh!

Chair Monteforte: PR can watch it on our high definition 21.5-inch high-resolution computer.

Roll Call Finance: All Present Student Activities: All Present COLA: Senator Katz, Senator Cheney, Excused CODEEE: All Present Student Action: Senator Doran, Chair Simmons, excused. Public Relations: All Present Academic Affairs: All Present

Adjournment End Time: 9:00